Erlang tools and packaging

Working with Erlang for writing RESTful interfaces JSON is the communication "language" of choice. For simplifying the process of JSON to a model the backend could work with efficiently I've created marumodels. This app decodes the JSON with _jiffy and uses functions generated by a modified version of Ulf's exprecs to create an Erlang record. The generated functions are created with type information from the record definition and when a property is set for the record through these functions it is first passed to the convert function of marumodeltypes to do any necessary processing.

I separated this application into a separate repo to simplify people trying the examples. But the real development will be done in the Maru main repo.

Its probably no great surprise to anyone that I dislike Rebar a lot. That said there are times when I have no choice but to use it. This is always either because a company I am contracting for uses it, or an open source project I am contributing to uses it. When I am forced to use it there are a few things I don't want to give up. Most important among these is Flymake for Erlang. The default setup for Flymake doesn't work for Rebar projects because Flymake does not know where the code and include paths for dependencies are. Fortunately, we can fix this with a few lines of elisp.

There are two defvars that point to functions that are used to search for the correct code paths and include paths respectively. We are going to replace those functions with our own functions. Both these functions search upwards from the directory that contains the file pointed to by the current buffer, looking for the top most 'rebar.config' in the directory path. It then uses that for a base and searches down the directory structure looking for either 'ebin' files or 'include' files.

There are two things to note here. The first is that you must have already run get-deps for rebar for this to work and the second is that if your project is truly huge or you have way more dependencies then you probably need this search could take a second or two. That is a second or two too long in an interactive compiler like Flymake. That said, the likelihood that you will run into this second problem is quite low.

Getting Started

The very thing you want to do is ensure that you have required the erlang-flymake module. Most of what we do below depends on this.

(require 'erlang-flymake)

Finding the Top rebar.config

The second thing we want to do is look for the top rebar.config in the project. If a rebar project contains more then one OTP application its quite likely that it will contain more then one rebar.config. The very topmost rebarconfig` is the right one to serve as root of our search. So we introduce a set of recursive functions to look for that top level dir.

In this function, we get the directory containing the file pointed at by the current buffer. We then call our recr function. If it returns a directory we return that, if it returns nil however, we call the original erlang-flymake-get-app-dir function.

At this point we should have our project root. Now its a simple matter of recursively searching down the directory tree looking for files of a certain name. So we create a function that does just that, given a directory and a name will return a list of absolute paths for each subdirectory that matches the specified name.

This approach is a bit of a hack, we basically use some heuristics to find a root and then just grab everything under that that looks remotely like a code or include directory. While its a bit hacky it has the valuable upside that its flexible and robust.

Common Test is a well thought out integration testing framework for Erlang. If you
are not using it you probably should be. However, it has one fault. It
does not return non-negative exit status' to the caller when the tests
fail. This is a major oversight, and it makes it difficult to use as
part of a continuous integration scheme or in a make based build
system.

The long term fix is for the OTP folks to resolve the issue in the ct_run command. To that end I have filed a bug report with the
Erlang folks. In the short term, though, we need this behaving
correctly. After much twiddling around with different solutions and
conversions on the erlang-questions list. This solution finally popped
out of a conversation with Lukas Larsson. Basically, we use the old
unix standby of awk.

Fred, of Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good, today posted on his blog about the problems around how rebar handles releases, Rebar Releases and Being Wrong. The problems he mentions and a few others are why, despite giving it a legitimate shot, I have found rebar unusable for my workflow to be efficient and stable while adhering to OTP standards at the same time.

I suggest first reading his post, if you already use rebar, and then continuing on with the rest of this.

I'll start with an example on the generation of a project containing two applications and a dependency from one of those applications of cowboy. Next, I'll create a release (and in the process a deployable target system) to show the difference in how sinan handles this process.

First, you can download the latest version sinan from this link, it is simply an executable escript, so 'chmod +x sinan' and put it in your PATH and you are good to go.

Sinan provides a 'gen' command to create your project. I include the output of the steps I took to build this project. Sinan assumes this is a multiple application project, but if you give "y" instead it will create a directory structure similar to rebars default structure with a src/ directory instead of a lib/ directory.

$ sinan gen
Please specify your name
your name> Tristan Sloughter
Please specify your email address
your email> [email protected]
Please specify the copyright holder
copyright holder ("Tristan Sloughter")>
Please specify name of your project
project name> rel_example
Please specify version of your project
project version> 0.0.1
Please specify the ERTS version ("5.9")>
Is this a single application project ("n")>
Please specify the names of the OTP apps that will be developed under this project. One application to a line. Finish with a blank line.
app> app_1
app ("")> app_2
app ("")>
Would you like a build config? ("y")> y
Project was created, you should be good to go!

We now have a project named rel_example and can see the generated contents.

$ cd rel_example/
$ ls
config doc lib sinan.config

Before going further I add the line {include_erts, true}. to sinan.config so that a generated tarball of the release contains erts and can be booted on a machine without Erlang installed.

You'll see we have a lib directory with two applications containing their source files under a src directory. Now in order to boot the release we'll create, we need to remove a couple tings from each supervisor. Instead of creating something for them to supervise just remove the variable AChild and replace [AChild] with [].

Next, so we have a third party dependency in the example, add cowboy to the applications in nano lib/app1/src/app1.app.src:

{applications, [kernel, stdlib, cowboy]},

Sinan provides a depends command to show the depenedencies of the project and where they are located:

Sinan has created a lib directory containing all necessary applications for our release as well as the needed files for booting the release. Additionally the dist command creates a tar.gz for easy deployment. But if we simply want to run our release where we are we can:

This is only the tip of the iceberg of what sinan is capable of. I can't go into all of it here but I'll mention that you are able to define multiple releases for a project to generate and which of your project apps to include in each. Additionally you are able to provide a custom rel file if you require tweaks.

The important part to take away from this post is the structure of what you are working with when using sinan and how it is based on OTP standards, both for the source you work on and the results of the build process under _build/.

Why Cowboy and Batman.js

There are a lot of Erlang web frameworks out there today. Not all are modeled after the MVC model (see Nitrogen), but I think all of them are addressing the problem the wrong way. I recently gave a presentation, slides here and the code for this example here, describing my perferred method for using Erlang for web development and why I think it is the best way to go. In this post, I'll go into more details on how to build the Erlang backend for the TodoMVC clone I did with Batman.js. I will not spend time on Batman.js but instead only give a quick list of reasons I prefer it to other Javascript frameworks.

Batman.js advantages:

Automatic URL generation based on model

HTML data-bind templates

Coffeescript Cowboy is a newer Erlang web server that provides a REST handler based on Webmachine. Both of these are perfect for developing a RESTful API, because they follow the HTTP standard exactly and when you are building an API based on HTTP, being able to properly reason about how the logic of the application maps to the protocol eases development and eases getting REST "right".

Nginx

Any non-dynamic content should be served by Nginx since there is no logic needed and it is something Nginx is great at, so why have Erlang do it? The snippet below configures Nginx to listen on port 80 and serve files from bcmvc's priv directory. Each request is checked to see if it is a POST or any other method with a JSON request type. If either of those are true, the request is proxied on to a server listening on port 8080, in our case the Cowboy server.

Cowboy Dispatch and Supervisor

Dispatch rules are matched by Cowboy to know what handler to send the request to. Here we have two rules. One that matches just the URL /todos and one that matches the URL with an additional element which will be associated with the atom todo. Both requests will be sent to the module bcmvctodohandler.

Cowboy provides a useful function childspec_ for creating a child specfication to use in our supervisor. The child spec here tells Cowboy we want a TCP listener on port 8080 that handles the HTTP protocol. We additionally provide our dispatch list for it to match against and pass on requests.

Cowboy Handler

Now that we have a server on port 8080 that knows to send certain requests to our todo handler, we can build the module. The first required function to export is init/3. This function let's Cowboy know we have a REST protocol, this is how it knows what functions to call (some have defaults and some existing in our module) to handle the request.

Knowing that this is a REST handler Cowboy will pass the request on to allowedmethods/2_ to find out if our handler is able to handle this method. Next, the content types accepted and provided by the handler are checked against the incoming request. The expected HTTP response status codes are returned if any of these fail. 405 for allowedmethods, XXX for _contenttypesaccepted and XXX for contenttypesprovided.

Now the request is sent to the function that handles the HTTP method type of the request.

For a POST, a request to create a new todo item, the function processpost/2_ is sent the request. Here we retrieve the body, a JSON object, from the request, convert it to a record and save the model. We'll see how this record conversion is done when we look at the model module. To inform the frontend of the id of our new resource we set the location header to be the path with the id.

For this handler we expect PUT for an update to an object, that is what Batman.js does, but a PATCH would make more sense. For a PUT the URL contains the id for the todo item to be updated. That is retrieved with the_ binding/2_ function. The todo record is created the same as in processpost/2_ but then the this id is set for the model and the update/1 function is used to save it to the database.

For a GET request, which for this application we do not deal with a request for a single todo item, all todo items are retrieved from the model module. Each of these is passed to the model's tojson/1_ function and the result of converting each to JSON is combined into a binary string and placed between brackets so the Batman.js frontend receives a proper JSON list of JSON objects.

Models

Model's are repsented as records and must provide serialization functions to go between JSON and a record. Each model uses a parse transform that creates functions for creating and updating the record. The transform is a modified version of exprecs from Ulf Wiger that also uses the type definitions in the record to ensure when setting a field that it is the correct type. For example in the todo model isDone is a boolean, so when the model is created the boolean convert function will be matched to convert the string representation to an atom:

The_ ?recordtojson_ and ?jsontorecord macros are defined in jsonerl.hrl. These marcos are generic and work for any record that is typed and uses the model transform.

Conclusion

Clearly, much of what the resource handler and model do is generic and can be abstracted out so that implementing new models and resources can be even simpler. This is the goal of my project Maru. Currently it is based on Webmachine but is now being convered to Cowboy.

In the end, using Cowboy for building a RESTful interface for your application allows you to build interfaces for the frontend entirely separted from backend development, and if you want multiple interfaces (like native mobile and web), they both talk directly to the same backend. Also, from the beginning you have the option to open up your application with an API for other developers to take your application new places, and, shameless plug here, add your API to Mashape to spread your new app!